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Today:
Weird Ice That Could Form on Alien Planets Observed For First Time
NEWS | 23 February 2025
Previously predicted by theoretical models, we now have the first experimental observation of plastic Ice VII. That might sound like a low-budget franchise movie, but it's actually an exotic phase of water that scientists think could form in oceans on alien planets. Well, plastic Ice VII needs incredibly high temperatures and pressures to form. However, there was one surprise: the molecules inside plastic Ice VII weren't rotating freely but turning in staggered steps. "The QENS measurements suggested a different molecular rotation mechanism for plastic ice VII than the free rotor behavior initially expected," explains Rescigno.

Top Stories:
Yogurt Shows Great Potential Against Colon Cancer, Study Reveals
NEWS | 23 February 2025
Overall, epidemiologists did not find a significant association between yogurt and the overall incidence of colorectal cancer – the third most common cancer worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths. However, when researchers split colorectal cancer cases into subtypes, they did find a significant result. In about 30 percent of colorectal cancer cases, this bacterium is incorporated into tumor tissue, where it is commonly associated with a particularly aggressive form of the cancer. Compared to distal colon cancer, which results in tumors further down the intestinal tract, proximal colon cancer has a lower survival rate. "It provides an additional avenue for us to investigate the specific role of these factors in the risk of colorectal cancer among young people."

World:
Black Hole at The Center of Our Galaxy Seen 'Bubbling' With Activity
NEWS | 23 February 2025
The activity profile of this black hole was new and exciting every time that we looked at it." "Of course, the processes are more dramatic because the environment around a black hole is much more energetic and much more extreme." "A magnetic reconnection event is like a spark of static electricity, which, in a sense, also is an 'electric reconnection,'" Yusef-Zadeh said. "This is the first time we have seen a time delay in measurements at these wavelengths," Yusef-Zadeh said. Those observations could serve as clues to the physical processes at work in the disk swirling around the black hole.

Current Events:
This New Drug Mimics The Health Effects of Living at High Altitude
NEWS | 23 February 2025
Scientists are designing a new type of drug that mimics the physiological benefits of breathing in thin 'mountain air'. Continuous low-oxygen provided by a daily pill could prove life-saving for people with serious metabolic diseases, like Leigh syndrome. Leigh syndrome is a rare, progressive disease where mitochondria can't use the body's oxygen fast enough. Children with Leigh syndrome often die within the first few years of life. It's not clear if humans with Leigh syndrome respond in the same way to low-oxygen environments.

News Flash:
New Record: Reactor Crosses 'Crucial Milestone' in Achieving Nuclear Fusion
NEWS | 23 February 2025
French scientists on Tuesday announced that they had reached a "crucial milestone" in the long road towards nuclear fusion by managing to maintain raging-hot plasma for a record 22 minutes. Nuclear fusion has the much-vaunted potential to provide the world with clean, safe and nearly inexhaustible energy – but the scientific holy grail has remained stubbornly elusive over decades. Among other things, the process requires temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius to create and maintain plasma. This hot, electrically charged gas easily becomes unstable, which can lead to lost energy and limit the efficiency of a possible future nuclear fusion reactor. But there are still many "technological barriers" to overcome before thermonuclear fusion can "produce more energy than it consumes", she added.

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Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 23 February 2025
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Latest:
Mystery of Weird Signal Detected in The Australian Desert Finally Solved
NEWS | 23 February 2025
This, occasionally, has led to some interesting problems, the most famous, perhaps, being a microwave oven that created puzzling signals in radio telescope data. Scientists at Brown University in the US recently identified another puzzling signal – and it could lead to improvements in radio astronomy. Previously, any data polluted by anthropogenic radio interference was simply discarded, since it was too hard to isolate and extract the contaminating signal. To characterize the signal detected by the Murchison Widefield Array, the researchers used multiple methods to refine the data. "This is a key step toward making it possible to subtract human-made interference from the data," Pober says.

Breaking:
Tomatoes Don't Kill Humans, And We Just Figured Out Why
NEWS | 23 February 2025
Tomatoes belong to the same plant family, Solanaceae, and produce toxic steroidal glycoalkaloids too. Yet, generally, tomatoes don't kill us. Once believed to be poisonous, tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) actually convert their bitter toxins into something more palatable and less deadly. Sichuan University biologist Feng Bai and colleagues have now identified the genetic mechanisms involved in the tomato fruit's safe transformation. Solanaceae make use of steroidal glycoalkaloids as a natural defense against pests.

Trending:
Radiation From an Exploding Star May Have Altered Evolution on Earth
NEWS | 23 February 2025
If a star explodes in space and no one is around to see it, does it wreak a change on terrestrial evolution? Radiation is thought to be one of the contributing drivers of evolution here on Earth, a chaotic influence that pushes cells to mutate, for good or for ill (or for neutral). Evolution would happen with or without radiation; but it can play a role in nudging changes along. Indeed, a 2019 study already linked the iron-60 spike to this very supernova event. The team performed simulations to find out how this explosion would have affected Earth – aside from the iron-60 spike, that is.

This Just In:
Microsoft Claims a Major Quantum Breakthrough, But What Does It Do?
NEWS | 23 February 2025
If Microsoft's claims pan out, the company may have leapfrogged competitors such as IBM and Google, who currently appear to be leading the race to build a quantum computer. Where an ordinary computer stores information in bits, a quantum computer stores information in quantum bits – or qubits. This means a quantum computer would be much faster than an ordinary computer for certain kinds of calculations – particularly some to do with unpicking codes and simulating natural systems. Even for a Majorana-based quantum computer, such as the one announced by Microsoft, one operation – known as T-gate – won't be achievable without errors. At the same time, research into the exotic and obscure behaviour of Majorana particles will continue at universities around the globe.

Today:
NASA Has Some Good News About The Asteroid That Could Hit Earth
NEWS | 23 February 2025
The chance that an asteroid capable of wiping out a city will hit Earth in eight years has been cut in half to around 1.5 percent, according to new calculations from NASA. The drop in odds had been widely anticipated by the global astronomical community, which now broadly expects the probability the asteroid will hit Earth on December 22, 2032 to fall down to zero. For more than 24 hours, the asteroid did have the highest probability of hitting Earth – 3.1 percent – of such a big space rock in modern forecasting. Updated calculations posted by NASA late Wednesday said the odds of a direct hit had fallen to 1.5 percent. There is still an 0.8 percent chance that the asteroid will hit the Moon, according to NASA.

Top Stories:
Ozempic Literally Came From a Monster – And It's Not Alone
NEWS | 23 February 2025
The toxic bite of a Gila monster can kill a human, but a specific ingredient in the cocktail of the lizard's venom is the reason we have glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1) agonists like Ozempic and Wegovy. Drucker had read about the work of endocrinologist John Eng, gastroenterologist Jean-Pierre Raufman and biochemist John Pisano, who had sequenced the proteins in Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) venom and found two that looked like human GLP-1. Drucker and his team from the University of Toronto acquired a Gila monster from the Utah Zoo's breeding program to dissect for further research. This work confirmed that the lizard species' unique genes produce a protein, Exendin-4, that fit the bill, mimicking GLP-1 while hanging round in the human body for far longer. In isolation, the peptide chlorotoxin Cy5.5 had already been found to bind to ion channels on brain tumor cells, but not to normal human cells.

World:
Places on Earth Too Hot For Humans Will Triple This Century, Scientists Warn
NEWS | 23 February 2025
It's something we might need to prepare for, especially because these projections lie at the milder end of global warming scenarios. "Our findings show the potentially deadly consequences if global warming reaches 2 °C," says climate scientist Tom Matthews from King's College in London. Beyond that, there's 'uncompensable' heat, where there's more heat going into your body than its mechanisms to stabilize internal temperature can keep up with. Then there's unsurvivable heat, which is enough to kill you. At 2 °C warming above preindustrial levels, unsurvivable thresholds will be breached in certain areas only for adults over 60.

Current Events:
Ancient Fossils Reveal A Surprising Truth About Australian Dinosaurs
NEWS | 23 February 2025
frameborder="0″ allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen">A first for AustraliaCarcharodontosaurs were apex predators in South America and Africa for much of the mid-Cretaceous. Despite their success in South America and Africa, carcharodontosaur fossils had never been found in Australia – until now. The most complete skeletons are from South America, including a relatively large one – roughly nine metres long. (Nadir Kinani/Museums Victoria)More discoveries yet to comeWe have much to learn about Australia's Cretaceous dinosaurs. Carcharodontosaurs might have been the apex predators in South America, but megaraptorids ruled the roost in the land down under.

News Flash:
Ghostly Glow of Nuclear Power Station Detected in Water 150 Miles Away
NEWS | 23 February 2025
This event was the first time that water had been used to detect a particle known as an antineutrino, which originated from a nuclear reactor more than 240 kilometers (150 miles) away. Electron antineutrinos are emitted during nuclear beta decay, a type of radioactive decay in which a neutron decays into a proton, an electron, and antineutrino. One of these electron antineutrinos can then interact with a proton to produce a positron and a neutron, a reaction known as inverse beta decay. Antineutrinos are produced in prodigious quantities by nuclear reactors, but they're relatively low energy, which makes them difficult to detect. The result suggests that water detectors could be used to monitor the power production of nuclear reactors.